Chunking

Turning undifferentiated information into chunks — deciding what goes on one page and what goes on another, and where the seams inside a page fall.

You are chunking whenever you decide what belongs on this page and what belongs on that one; when you put something under a heading; when you change a heading's level; when you make a list. It looks like formatting and it is not. It is a knowledge-design decision about the rough shape of the network — and the shape of the network is what a reader can find, link to, and think with (Link concepts, not coordinates · One canonical home per concept · Name the Concept in the Singular).

The failure it names is specific: a whole document with no differentiation. That is a fine shape for a book and a poor one for a wiki, because nothing inside it can be pointed at. A concept buried at the third heading of a long page cannot be linked to as a concept, so every reference to it either misses or drags the whole document along (Semantic Capture · Levels of Abstraction · Module).

The encouraging part is that wikis are exceptionally good at rechunking once the need is seen. Nothing here is a one-time decision; a page that has grown two subjects gets split, and two thin pages that were one thought get merged. That is ordinary maintenance rather than a redesign (Continuous Improvement · Prune · Weave, don't delete · Progressive canonization).

Different tools give the same act different handles — a visual map uses space, an outliner gives one chunk and one axis of nesting, a wiki gives pages, headings and levels. The underlying judgment is the same in all of them: what is one thing?

The practical test the canon's conventions imply: if it has a name that other pages want to link to, it is a page; if it only makes sense inside its neighbours, it is a section (The Field · Maps of Content · Room).

Also called: rechunking Stands on: Language · Naming · Design Opens onto: One canonical home per concept · Name the Concept in the Singular · Maps of Content · Link concepts, not coordinates · Levels of Abstraction · Module · The Wiki Reflects the Present · Curating In play: the Workshop — the decision made every time a page grows past one subject Sources: Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Chunking (draft — the definition, the five moments of chunking, the undifferentiated-document failure, and the rechunking note) · lionsberg.wiki: Chunking Open: The source page is written about the tools rather than about the judgment, and names no test for what counts as one thing; the test above is drawn from the canon's naming conventions. · It points at a Modular Content page that carries adjacent meaning, and neither relates to the other. · Inbound links were not counted.